Washington’s New Museums Promise to Be a Waste of Space and Money 

D on’t we have enough museums? As part of the COVID relief and stopgap appropriations bill, Congress approved the establishment and construction of two new museums in Washington near the Mall. One focuses on Latino Americans while the other examines the history of women. The two buildings are expected to cost $400 million each. It’s thought that they’ll use the same financing model as the very good, new African American History and Culture Museum, which raised half of its $350 million tariff through philanthropy and the other half from a federal appropriation.

I admire H. R. Gross, a longtime — now dead — congressman from Iowa and the budget hawk with the beadiest, most relentless eye ever. He consistently voted against new spending, memorably opposing the Vietnam War not on moral grounds but because bombs were so expensive. “A million bucks, and, poof, they’re gone,” he noted, and no one can argue with that. I haven’t seen any apparitions, but I feel Gross’s spirit upon me, and he’s angry and red-faced.

I know the feds have lost control of the country’s finances, which is a very bad thing, and two pricey new museums in museum-saturated Washington isn’t a priority, but the mission of both seems nebulous and mammoth, though one seems spurious as well. I can think of better ways to spend the money, especially since so many American museums claim to be broke.

“Latino” or “Hispanic” is a gringo term. It condenses, and it minimizes nuance. Americans with south-of-the-border heritage have roots in so many different, disparate places. Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Canary Islands, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Peru, and a dozen other places have distinct cultures and, in America, wildly different trajectories. New Mexico has many descendants of Spanish grandees who came there in the 1600s.

Granted, my Italian grandmother was born not too long after the reunification of Italy. She was from Modena and thought Sicily was really part of Africa. My grandfather hailed from Fano, near Ravenna and Rimini. Neither felt any feeling, warm or cold, toward any other part of Italy. The experiences of Neapolitans, Venetians, Calabrians, and the Milanese weren’t theirs. I suspect people with Mexican heritage aren’t anymore smitten by Cuban themes than they are with maple-sugar making and white picket fences, which Vermonters can extol without end.

I don’t think this new museum can or will be coherent. I don’t think people from these places have an all-encompassing identity, much as Americans with European or Asian heritage don’t. I’d rather see museums in cities with, for instance, big Cuban-American or Dominican-American populations focus on history and culture that mean something to the locals. There are dozens of museums doing this now. Centralizing the vast, discordant history of Latinos-in-America in Washington will make for a bland mishmash.

It seems a boondoggle and gravy train. People having some form of Spanish acculturation seem to assimilate quickly. A generation or two from now, I wonder what the museum’s constituency would be.

If Congress and the promoters of this new museum want to do something useful and economically efficient, they should partner with the Hispanic Society of America in Manhattan on the Upper West Side. It’s the greatest least-known museum and library in the country. It’s a repository of art, books, and manuscripts directly related to cultures and places where Spanish or Portuguese are or were spoken and in a gorgeous, huge Beaux-Arts building. Its collection of art and manuscripts is superlative, the best of its kind of both outside Spain. Its paintings by Velazquez, Goya, Ribera, and Murillo would invest the cause of Latino history in America with majesty.

The NEA should broker a deal where Congress pays for the Hispanic Society’s renovation and expansion to accommodate a history component focused on Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking immigrants. The Hispanic Society is a serious place. It would give the history enterprise instant credibility. It would situate the exploration of history in a city which, unlike Washington, actually has a big, diverse public with roots in the Old World, Mexico, or South America. The Hispanic Society is in Spanish Harlem.

What we’d lose is a sparkling, pricey new thing and lots of ego trips. What we’d gain is substance. The shade of H. R. Gross, happy at the money saved, will be moved to try the fandango.

One gripe with a women’s history museum, aside from our national, nonchalant nosedive toward insolvency, is the glut of museums already in Washington. When will they start cannibalizing each other?

I don’t doubt the programming “can” be good. The New York Historical Society has a women’s history component. I was the director of the historical society’s museum when it started. Its women’s history branch has done some excellent exhibitions. The topics are there. That said, Washington already has a Women in the Arts museum, so there’s going to be duplication. And the Smithsonian museums already do lots of scholarship aimed at female artists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, and activists.

The new Washington museum seems to focus on American women. I think this is too narrow. Women’s history, in Western culture at least, starts with the Greek goddesses and the Old Testament. Western history, after all, begins with Helen of Troy and the beauty contest among Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite. I saw a sumptuous, fascinating show at the Peabody Essex Museum a few years ago on Chinese empresses. There’s a show on Nefertiti at the Kimbell in Fort Worth now. The story of gender roles and how they unfold in history start with very old cultures, not with suffragettes and bra burners. They’re the slimmest slice of the story.

Ignored, uncontextualized, unknown history where women were pivotal is a big, meaty trove that crosses cultural boundaries. I’d broaden the museum’s sweep to embrace everything. Can it avoid the tag “trans hate group?” Will it have a gallery defining what a woman is? Your guess is as good as mine.

The National Women’s History Museum actually exists. It’s mostly online, with some archives and a staff. I looked at its latest federal tax return and its last annual report, which covers 2017. Its budget, as far as I can tell, is over $1 million. It raises money. I find its online programming as buoyant and buzzy as a platter of warm champagne. It’s boring and predictable. It’s remedial, not creative or incisive, and will surely become preachy. If this is the zeitgeist of the place, it’s not worth the money.

History museums have one gaping, usually unbridgeable pitfall. The galleries are easily consumed by text and graphics, overwhelming the objects as well as the story. Graphic designers have egos, too, and their self-aggrandizement is more developed now than it was when I was a curator. Curators traditionally didn’t use graphic designers. We designed the wall murals and texts ourselves. Yes, they were simple, but we didn’t want text and images to clutter the walls and compete with the art, which is, after all, the star of the show.

History museums generally don’t offer much art. They work mostly with artifacts. Eleanor Roosevelt’s false teeth are worth a mortified glance, but they’re relics and not powerful ones. To add spice to the history-museum experience, designers develop splashy and, ultimately, distracting graphics. Since these fancy graphics are so expensive, the museums don’t change displays, so the galleries seem static. That’s the only big problem with the Museum of African American History and Culture: It suffers from the hegemony of the designer class. There, many of the objects are compelling and put up a good fight. Some of the best galleries at the museum feature jazz and Motown, which leave the graphics in the dust. At the Holocaust Museum, every object, even the simplest ones, seem to have authority. Many galleries, though, are overwhelmed by graphics.

I suspect, since the new museums will be in Washington, that the graphic-design crowd will reign supreme. This will ruin both places. The Museum of African American History and Culture is on the way to becoming a tourist attraction, though I’m hopeful its many good facets will keep in on a serious path. I don’t see this happening with these two new museums, so I wonder why we need them.